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acquired-stardust · 2 months ago

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Anime Spotlight #4: Gunsmith Cats (1995)

It's time for another spotlight! Join Ash as she takes a look at one of the coolest anime of the 90s along with some of the circumstances of its creation as well as some of the cultural context of the time with this article.

If you've been looking for something to watch or just want to pass a little time reading, Acquired-Stardust has you covered - check under the break for another entry in our series of spotlights on games and anime that are well worth your time!

It's November 13th, 1994, and the Chicago police department has recieved some reather peculiar guests for a tour of the facility. They've come all the way from Japan, cameras in hand and fresh off exploring the streets of the Windy City scouting locations as well as a trip to a gun range, for a film project. They're staff from Oriental Light and Magic, a studio operating out of Tokyo, and astonishingly their film project isn't live action - it's an animation.

Animation is not an art form that has historically garnered much respect in the west. Although by November of 1994 we would be well into the Disney Rennaissance, it's actually so early into the more recent mainstreamification of animation that Cartoon Network's first in-house production Space Ghost Coast to Coast (1994) is only a mere six months old.

In a time long before Toonami and 'Pokemania', when most Americans thought animation, cartoons, to be a form of entertainment for children and would likely conjure to mind images of one of many incarnations of Tom and Jerry or Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969), it's hard for the average person not paying attention to the medium at large to conceptualize the phenomenon that Japanese animation has become in its native market as well as in limited American markets as an import for several decades, and the depth that the medium would have.

The officers of the CPD, proudly posing with and demonstrating a "Chicago typewriter" submachine gun to an impressed group of Japanese OLM staffers, had no way of knowing that that revolution would go on to capture America wholesale in just a few short years. That tidal wave was approaching fast, and OLM themselves would come to play a big part in it. Oriental Light and Magic, or OLM, would go on to be known for themselves helping to usher in Pokemania by animating the Pokemon anime, with the Gunsmith Cats team in particular being responsible for the bulk of Pokemon's movies.

The studio would also handle Berserk's incredible 1997 adaptation, as well as assisting on majorly influential titles like FLCL (2000) and recent craze DAN DA DAN (2024), but the only projects the OLM of 1994 has under their belts as a studio is providing graphics for three video games. This relative lack of experience as a company at the time (though not as individual talents under the OLM banner) makes the results of their outing all the more impressive.

Gunsmith Cats has something of a convoluted existence. Originating as a manga spin-off of Kenichi Sonoda's previous effort, the 1989 OVA Riding Bean, Gunsmith Cats as a manga is something of an alternate universe retelling and remix of Riding Bean that sees previous sidekick Rally Vincent take the reins as the lead role with her own new partner as a combination gunsmith/bounty hunter in Chicago.

The same way that the manga remixes elements of Riding Bean into a new, more focused and well rounded effort, Gunsmith Cats' 1995 animated version does much the same - certain characters and elements are refined and streamlined, certain rough edges are smoothed out and it ultimately coalesces into a project that is an incredible testament to the power of inspiration and obsession, as well as the OVA format as a whole. Despite diverging from the manga with an OVA-original antagonist with an extremely cool design and backstory, it's hard to complain about what we got.

Sitting atop a rather large hill of intersectionality, Gunsmith Cats represents and encapsulates the peak of various shifting landscapes in both American and Japanese culture and isn't all that dissimilar in style and substance to Hideo Kojima's fantastic 1996 adventure game Policenauts (for which you can read my article on by clicking here). A tribute to lifelong obsessions with cars, guns and American movies, Gunsmith Cats is one part Blues Brothers (1980), one part Leathal Weapon (1987) and one part Bubblegum Crisis (1987), guided by anime royalty of a now-previous generation in Kenichi Sonoda, who crafted it with the touch that only an obsessive fan can possibly hope to achieve.

It is an incredibly animated, wonderfully scored tribute to three of the things that American and Japanese media both ran on in the 1980s: guns, cars and girls. To that end OLM, as seen in a documentary included in the DVD release apparently produced by ADV Films, sought to draw out the potential of Gunsmith Cats with extremely extensive research into cars and guns with their trip to Chicago in pre-production, and their excursion absolutely paid off in spades.

The keen eye for detail present in the original work as well as the deep research and scouting undergone by OLM shines incredibly brightly here, coalescing into a romp the likes of which is only able to be executed with a level of quality and detail only possible in an OVA. Extremely authentic to its inspirations and a very specific brand of American culture that has long since faded, Chicago is rendered in stunning detail and has largely managed to avoid falling into the infamous 'Japanifornia' amalgamation many adjacent things do.

Guns and cars look and sound authentic, rendered with a similar level of detail and care to the city of Chicago itself, and the character designs by Kenichi Sonoda and Norihiro Matsubara practically leap off the screen to a degree that one could say the cars, guns and city itself are just as much the stars of the show as the human characters.

As for those human characters, they are similarly appealing in both design and personality, and the scenario in which they play is a very authentic take on one you could find in many big American movies of the era in which Gunsmith Cats looks to pay tribute featuring slimy ATF agents (no doubt inspired in part by previous incidents earlier in the decade that would color Amercian perception of the bureau for the remainder of the 90s), gangsters, corruption, informants and a particularly ruthless Russian (or is she Ukranian?) antagonist.

But Gunsmith Cats doesn't just stun visually. Its soundtrack, composed by jazz musician Peter Erskine, would undoubtedly serve as partial inspiration for landscape changing classics such as Cowboy Bebop (1998) which the opening animation, extremely similar to the iconic "Tank!" in both visuals and music, can attest to. Peter Erskine's score shines brightly here and even has an elaborate car chase scene in which it is allowed to take center stage.

As previously mentioned, sound effects such as firearms and Rally Vincent's iconic Shelby GT500 are largely captured from their real world counterparts recorded during the crew's excursions to America. The sounds of Chicago were so meticulously documented and applied that supposedly even an ADV employee at the time from the area recognized the overhead rail heard in the series as being just down the street from her parents' house.

Tasked with the English-language adaptation, now-defunct studio ADV Films was in top form with the production despite it only being their sixth, featuring some very strong cast members (those with an ear and eye for these things will note numerous cast members in various other ADV Films adaptations such as Neon Genesis Evangelion) as well as a strong script. A small thing that helps sell the overall authentic experience is the direction, notably featuring some panicked screaming in various scenes that sound less like the brand of phony made-for-animation yelling that one might be used to and much more like real human reactions.

As is typical with ADV Films the cast, writing and direction is extremely strong but can be a bit hit or miss, as many find protagonist Rally Vincent's sidekick, Minnie May Hopkins, to be annoying though I quite enjoy her. The strength and success of the English version, according to English-language writer/director Matt Greenfield recounting a discussion with Gunsmith Cats director Takeshi Mori, was vital in securing the funds necessary to produce the third and final episode of the OVA which had otherwise underperformed in Japan.

The main trio of the assertive and slightly androgynous Rally, tiny explosive-obsessed gremlin Minnie May and information specialist Becky all play off each other very well and are a lot of fun, though Minnie May is likely something of a sticking point for modern audiences due to her young appearance and mild sexualization, but it's important to remember that Gunsmith Cats follows a number of characters pretty deep into Chicago's criminal underworld and to not be lead too far astray by the cute and friendly art style it possesses.

These are characters who have likely been involved in all sorts of shady, horrible things which is easy to forget until some of the violence, not unlike the level of which you might find in films such as Die Hard (1998), comes crashing through to remind you that it is unafraid to give us glimpses of the rougher edges and underworld that the characters inhabit. Another of the rougher edges to Gunsmith Cats is its not-infrequent use of fanservice, something extremely standard at the time that has become an enduring trope of the medium but can often put people off to varying extents.

Gunsmith Cats is not just shockingly competent, it might be the greatest anime popcorn movie of all time. It has practically everything you could ever look for in an anime or even just an entertainment experience, and it has it all in abundance. It's rare that anything ever lives up to the 'good old days' that one forges in the fires of nostalgia, but Gunsmith Cats unquestionably does and is a shining example of just how good now-retro anime could be. It's a great testament to the OVA format as a whole, where a budget would be applied to a smaller number of total episodes to inject a huge dose of quality into a shorter runtime than a longer TV series would get.

Despite its strong Japanese dub I highly recommend you check out the series in English for the effort that ADV Films put into helping make the series as authentic as possible as well as its strengths on its own merits. The Japanese audio track on the whole is also a bit too muted for my taste, with voices and especially the unique soundtrack being a bit too subtle and quiet to really appreciate. With a total runtime of roughly an hour and a half, Gunsmith Cats' mere three episodes are an extremely fun ride and there's very little to lose by giving it a chance. Its soundtrack by Peter Erskine sets it apart from most other anime, and further music released as part of an expanded universe of radio dramas and original music albums provide some of the coolest anime tunes of all time with Water Club Band's "Groove From Heaven" and "Shelby G.T.500", and I highly recommend seeking these two songs out if you can find them.

If you've ever wanted to get into retro anime it's hard to find a better place to start than Gunsmith Cats. Its DNA runs through anime as a medium due to its connection to creator Kenichi Sonoda, one of 80s anime's uncrowned kings, as well as its undeniable influence on things such as Cowboy Bebop, to say nothing of OLM's later success. How many other anime can you say had an animation director solely in charge of making sure the firearms looked and performed authentically?

Grab yourself a drink and a snack and let OLM and ADV take you on a thrill ride through the "City of the Untouchables". Oozing with charm and quality, it's every bit the fun American-style action movie of which it is a pastiche and there's fewer better places to spend an hour and a half in the whole of the medium than on this absolute classic as slick and stylish as Rally's beloved car.

A gem hidden among the stones, Gunsmith Cats is undoubtedly stardust.

-- Ash

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acquired-stardust · 3 months ago

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Game Spotlight #18: Pokemon Yellow (1998)

Hi everybody, this is Larsa from Acquired Stardust here with a spotlight of my own this time. This time around we'll be discussing a game that truly means a lot to me and surely many of you. Needless to say this new year has already been a stressful one for me and probably for you too, so after some reflection I thought it would be healthy to channel that with more frequent writing so we can share more cool stuff with all of you more often.

And so thank you for reading so far. Today we're talking about a game that came out over 26 years ago - please join me for a nostalgic stroll through a Pokemon Yellow spotlight together!

This series truly needs no introduction and it is one that anybody reading this has surely played themselves. Pokemon in many respects is arguably the most important series that I have ever played and on a personal level revisiting these cozy games is always a good time. I have had my own personal journey with this incredible series in my formative years and it's safe to say that if it weren't for Pokemon reaching out to me in my childhood my life would surely not be the same.

Before we go much further I'd like to give a shoutout to my partner (and fellow Acquired-Stardust contributor) Ash for having already written about Pokemon Blue with their own spotlight, which you can read by clicking HERE. There is so much to write about when it comes to Pokemon and our own personal experiences with the series. I feel like there's just so much to the story of this series. Since Ash already covered Pokemon Blue pretty thoroughly I wanted to take the time to talk a bit about the rise of prominence the series had in the later 1990s rather than just strictly just writing about Pokemon Yellow as a video game, and I think this spotlight serves as a companion piece to Ash's.

It's safe to say that Pokemon is now among the elite group of the biggest video game franchises in the world when it comes to outreach and cultural impact over the past three decades. However there was once upon a time where we hadn't heard of Pokemon quite yet and some of us may remember the day we first came in contact with the franchise in one of it's many forms. To that end I would like to share with you a story from my childhood about my first time interacting with the Pokemon franchise and how it ended up being such a big deal to me.

Indeed it was November of 1998, a week before Thanksgiving in the United States, and my family invited their friends over who happened to have two kids that were around my age. The oldest sibling was two years older than me and had just been given a Gameboy as an early Christmas gift in October along with a copy of Pokemon Blue. Finding this out was the very first time that I had ever heard of Pokemon in my life and for good reason as the first video games in the series had only just released in North America two months beforehand. He excitedly showed me his Gameboy with the aforementioned game and told me "check this Pokemon game out with me. This is one of the coolest game ever!". He would have no idea just how right he was because I still play the game to this day and here I am still talking about it.

Right away my first impression was that my mind was blown by the sights and sounds coming out of the handheld console. For me this was my first experience up-close with a handheld gaming console and therefore the first time seeing a Gameboy game in action. Eventually he handed me the Gameboy and let me try out the game for myself along with a warning - I might not make it too far due to my age and reading ability which was true because at the time I was very young to the point that I hadn't even started going to school yet and had a fairly low reading level.

Getting to play Pokemon Blue for the very first time was like suddenly being able to cast a continuous magic spell that conjured incredible blurs of pixels in the palm of my hand. It wasn't long before I was picking Bulbasaur to be my original starting partner. After that I choice I was simply haphazardly mashing the confirm button and running around the map not really understanding much of what was being said in the game. Eventually the session would come to an end and I would wipe out time somewhere in Viridian Forest battling against a Bug Catcher trainer. I was a little devastated after the defeat because Bulbasaur fainted from the encounter and that must have meant that I messed the game up. Well it wouldn't be long before we decided to stop playing and we all left the house to go have a McDonalds lunch. I remember idly eating fries and thinking about how bad I was to let my pokemon lose in a battle. I felt seriously bad about the whole thing with Bulbasaur and how he had to get taken to the Pokemon Center to get healed back to fighting shape. Even though it was just a video game, what happened in it had made me feel some pretty real and complicated feelings. Thankfully a cheeseburger served as a good enough pick-me-up in those simpler times.

Well the experience still stuck with me afterward and it wasn't long before I was begging my parents to buy me a Gameboy and copy of Pokemon Blue. I needed to work hard to be able to read the text to become a better trainer for my poor Bulbasaur's sake and do a better of caring for them. I made a promise to my parents that I would learn to read English faster before being enrolled in school with the help of Pokemon because the games had lots of words for me to learn right away. Thankfully they eventually saw the merit in the game as a learning tool for me which led to them agreeing and they made my Christmas wish come true. This choice my parents made out of love for me sent me on the path of loving to read from an early age and fostered my passion for video games. What started as passion sparked thanks to Pokemon Blue would turn into a wider love for video games as an artform which would become a snowball effect helping lead to this blog. Funny how events in life work sometimes, huh? It's because of video games that I even met my partner, Ash. I felt it was necessary to share this story with you to set the stage for my experience with the main subject of this spotlight, Pokemon Yellow!

Yes it is about time that I talked about Pokemon Yellow with you, otherwise known as "Pokémon Yellow Version: Special Pikachu Edition" according to the North American box art. This was a special game in my opinion that I like to think of it as being truly a product of its own time. It would originally see a release in September of 1998 in Japan and then would be localized for the overseas markets the following year. By the time Pokemon Yellow would see an international release it had became clear to everybody that the Pokemon franchise was a global phenomena. In fact Pokemon Yellow was not even the first revised release among gen 1 titles, but it was yet another chance for the developers to touch up the original versions again with a different perspective this time as a result of all this attention and acclaim that the series had gotten and I imagine things would in a sense have been different for the developers at Game Freak as the series popularity was no longer in question and more advanced handheld technology was at their disposal for this title.

Nintendo being the company they were knew there was a ton of money to be made with the IP and prepared with an international marketing blitz. Eventually this would come to fruition as "Pokemania" had blossomed in full effect globally starting in 1998. As a child of the early 1990s how mainstream the series became in such a short amount of time cannot be understated in an age without the internet being as integrated in our lives like it is today. I can recall how much Pokemon felt like it took the world by storm seemingly completely out of nowhere. The franchise became so immediately popular that my peers frequently brought their Gameboy consoles and trading cards wherever they went. Furthermore it wasn't unusual for my youth soccer team to stick around for extra time after games to trade and battle via link cables (remember these?) with the opposing team in 1999. The "Pokemania" was everywhere and to be a child of the 90s meant you were likely swept up by it - the wildly successful video game releases, the popular anime series, and even a physical collectible trading card game along with an overwhelming merchandise had all hit the scene and taken off like wildfire. It didn't take

By the time that Pokemon Yellow version would be released the following year of 1999 in the United States of America. It wasn't long after Pokemon Yellow was released in North America that I would be lucky enough to own it, thanks to my parents. I even remember owning and reading what had been released of the Pokémon Adventures manga series initially the following year of 2000. Another first in my life thanks to the influence of "Pokemania" because the series would be the first manga that I read in my life. Things like this in my formative years helped shaped my interests in media form any years to come. I must give a big thanks to my mother for buying it for me from a bookstore at the local mall. Outside of the products there was many news stories with confused anchors and talking heads on television being forced to cover stories about this new global phenomena that had broken out from Japan. These factors all together gave me the feeling this wasn't just a flash in the pan these pocket sized creatures would be here to stay. Maybe unsurprisingly given how much of a runaway success "Pocket Monsters" had became around the globe a new mascot-themed release entered development as soon as the Japanese version of Pokemon Blue was finished.

Pokemon Yellow was envisioned as a way to capitalize on the series' wide spread popularity by more closely relating the adventures in the anime to the adventures players could have in the games. The beloved Pokemon anime which was animated by Oriental Light and Magic would serve as a guide for the many changes that would be made in this new Yellow version.

As an aside, fast forwarding to many years later, thanks to the massive "Gigaleak" event of 2020 we learned that Pokemon Yellow was at an early stage not the sole title in the early development process, as another game is mentioned in the source code. This leads to the speculation that Yellow may have originally planned to have been released alongside a companion title known as "Pokemon Pink" which many have come to speculate would have starred Clefairy, the originally-planned mascot for the series. We could assume that perhaps Clefairy would have been the mascot of this scrapped game. The original fairy of Pokemon was both the correct color which fit the theming it was also the original starter of pokemon trainer Red in the earlier mentioned Pokemon Adventures manga.

For whatever reason this game was not created and maybe given the infancy of the series at the time this was the correct choice in the end. It's possible that perhaps the changes brought in Yellow wouldn't have been seen as significant enough another round of paired versions and would have damaged the reputation that the franchise was rapidly amassing globally. In the end we got one game that acted as the ultimate first generation title, which started a concept that most generation of mainlines titles would revisit in one form or another. But I digress.

As you start Pokemon Yellow you are greeted with a new elaborate opening animation starring the de-facto face of the franchise to this day, Pikachu. Once you make your way to the 'new game' option this will all seem very familiar with a new twist. More colors, and actually a fair amount of them compared too! Professor Oak and Pallet Town were now in different colors than in the previous gen 1 titles giving a breath of fresh air to the experience for returning players. Yellow featured many new sprites inspired by the Pokemon anime designs and colors which assisted to make them feel more alive. Worth noting for about the new graphical advancement compared to the previous games, Pokemon Yellow was merely a Gameboy game with pre-programmed colors rather than a full-fledged Gameboy Color title. We wouldn't find out how good Pokemon would really look on the Gameboy Color until shortly after with the Generation 2 titles starting with the next mainline games, Pokemon Gold & Silver.

Ultimately compared to a native Gameboy Color game Pokemon Yellow's use of colors were extremely limited but the end result still looks so good in my opinion. I find the graphics of this version has a lot of its own unique charm and that many of these sprites would be the best a handful of Pokemon would look for years to come in my opinion. The sound effects and music are also basically still the same in this version compared to the previous version which is okay with me. I always found the 'gen 1' sounds to be a treat for the ears and the musical tracks still resonate strongly with me today. As your journey goes further and wider you will come to realize each town now has their own unique color palettes in an attempt to resemble their namesakes, yet another nice touch in this version.

This sort of thing made the region of Kanto feel more vibrant than it had ever been up to this point in these early games. The locales across Kanto in the English localization of Pokemon had more simplistic names that didn't communicate as much of the subtle ideas as their original Japanese namesakes. This sort of simplicity in the English localization focusing on the color theming from the Japanese names ended up being a fitting choice in its own ways for Yellow Version as the game introduced fitting color palettes to these locations from the hushed greys of Pewter City to the deep purple of Lavender Town for example. This change adds so much more personality to the game's locales and for me personally this blew my mind as a kid playing my first time.

As a pokemon trainer the goal of your adventure is the same as it ever was to choose your starter pokemon and travel across Kanto obtaining eight Gym Leader badges to earn the right to take on the Pokemon League Challenge. The key difference being that for this game you do not select your very first starter partner from a trio like previously. Instead, you are given a Pikachu as your starting companion just like the title and boxart suggest. Professor Oak has selected your starting pokemon for you on this adventure with you being given no choice in the matter. This particular Pikachu is much like their anime counterpart because they refuse to stay in their pokeball, and they absolutely refuse to evolve with a thunderstone. The developers wanted the story of the adventure to more closely resemble the anime and for players to feel more related to the journey Ash Ketchum goes through in the game, and as you get deeper into the game you will even encounter anime-favorite Team Rocket members Jessie, James, and Meowth, with the trio showing up as trainers you encounter through the game among the sea of Rocket Grunts. There are some minor differences here and there that are neat for fans of the anime.

This mandated starter however can be a problem for the fans of Raichu because you will not find any wild Pikachu in this game making that particular electric type impossible to obtain outside of trade methods. This fact really is a shame because me and Ash (my partner and fellow Acquired-Stardust contributor, not Ketchum!) absolutely adore Raichu for being downright adorable. Likewise there are other missing pokemon that aren't able to be found in this game without use of the link-cable functionally such as Jynx, Magmar, and Electabuzz just to name the most notable examples.

On the bright side for those that are fans of Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander line of pokemon you will be able to find all three of these fan favorites later on in your journey making this the first Pokemon game where you can get three "starter pokemon" without the necessity of trading whatsoever which is pretty incredible. Meanwhile since the tradition of a fire type, water type, and grass type starter pokemon isn't upheld in this title that means plenty more things are different too. Your rival no longer is able to outright immediately counter your starter with an opposing type with an advantage in battle like they would prefer to do as standard procedure for these games. Instead they will have to make due with the adorable normal type, Eevee. I'm happy to report that we still get our own partner Eevee in Celadon City much like in Red and Blue.

Anyway, your rival challenges you to a battle and after the result you will find out more about your new little yellow mouse buddy. As a result of this Pikachu having a strong independent personality as long as you have them as part of your party they won't spend the journey resting in their Pokeball which as was tradition, they instead decide to follow your every move on foot. To go along with the mentioned detail about Pikachu's personality this game features an early version of the happiness mechanic later expanded on in later Pokemon titles, meaning the more you depend on Pikachu for battles and show care for them by keeping them healthy the friendlier they will become with you, their current status indicated by animated portrait bubbles over their heads that will pop up as you interact with them and they make appropriate sounds derived from voice actress Ikue Otani from the anime.

Another immediate difference with Pokemon Yellow were the new health bars. For the first time health bars now came in different colors representing remaining health thresholds. This was a great quality of life change that assisted the players with more information over how battles were going and when it might me more ideal to go for a catch attempt on a wild pokemon. For battles themselves mechanically more or less the battle mechanics of Pokemon Yellow worked virtually identically to Pokemon Blue. Speaking of battles, Game Freak was aware of some of pain points that may be introduced by forcing Pikachu as the sole starter pokemon and tweaked the early game accordingly in various ways. One of the most obvious changes is how encounters are changed, with some pokemon that were version exclusive being featured in this game for example allowing players to catch previous Pokemon Red version-exclusive fighting type Mankey on Route 22.

Once a player caught a Mankey and raised it up several levels they could easily deal with the upcoming rock type gym battle. Another impactful early game change is the Nidoran line of pokemon learning Double Kick much earlier at level 10 rather than at level 43 near the end-game which gave you another super effective attack to take down the first gym leader.

Another nice quality of life change were the changes to moves some Pokemon can learn like Pikachu being able to learn the powerful thunderbolt naturally through leveling rather than having to use the single use valuable TM to learn said powerful move for battle, but for sure my favorite moveset adjustment is that Charizard is finally able to learn Fly which was long overdue. This may come as a surprise to those that didn't play these earlier titles when they were new but the idea of Charizard in Pokemon not being able to learn "Fly" was always a ridiculous one, and Pokemon Yellow did the fire breathing winged lizard justice when they corrected that absurdity.

However even with these generous changes many consider Pokemon Yellow to still be still the hardest official version of the original generation due to how some key encounters have been adjusted. One such way would be the gym leaders having teams to closer resemble what they use in the anime, different move-sets, and in some cases the levels of their pokemon being raised which all makes for more difficult encounters. The same applies to The Elite Four who are noticeably stronger than they were previously, making the last part of the game a more challenging gauntlet and earning the rite into the Hall of Fame all the more triumphant.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Fushica City you will find a brand new location called the "Sea House". It is here you will find a new mini game called Pikachu's Beach which you will be able to play if your faithful companion knows how to do the move Surf that is. Yes to play Pikachu's Beach you need a "Surfing Pikachu", so the question is how do you get one? Anyone familiar with the yellow mouse would know that Pikachu does not learn how to Surf through leveling up and you cannot teach it Surf via HM usage in the game either. So what gives? Yeah that's right, Pikachu does not natively learn the move through any legit method found in the game which means to play this particular minigame back in the day you must have either transferred a Pikachu into your cart of Pokemon Yellow that had learned the move "Surf" which was only obtainable through methods outside of the game, such as time limited events largely exclusive to Japan, or mailing your copy of Pokemon Yellow to Nintendo Power and then waiting for them to mail you the game back with a Pikachu that knew "Surf".

There is actually one last (non-cheating) method which was to fight for it in Nintendo 64's Pokemon Stadium (utilizing a peripheral that allowed you to plug your copy of the game into the system and play it on a television, itself mind blowing), and this way to earn surf for your Pikachu wouldn't be an easy one. You had to go through a higher difficulty battle challenge with your team from Pokemon Yellow and be sure to use Pikachu in every battle while winning. Like this method of obtaining the "Surfing Pikachu" is pretty extreme for an unlock in a handheld game isn't it? I have to say that the Pokemon Stadium method was an absolute time sink and requires so much potential additional financial cost of a player it is simply downright unfair that the developers ever entertained the idea in retrospect. This was all so much to ask of players and should have been a new feature for all players who bought Pokemon Yellow in the first place though of course this is all in hindsight. If you couldn't tell this was part of the game that I did not get to experience when I was younger just something that I read about in gaming magazines at the time. Maybe I have given this part more words than it deserves because it's really not all that big of a deal looking back at it.

Moving along now your reward for obtaining a "Surfing Pikachu" regardless of how you obtained it is a rather simple albeit addictive mini-game called "Pikachu's Beach". This minigame would see you control Pikachu while it surfed waves on a totally radical surfboard. I mean it was the 90s, so the only other thing that would have been more 90s coded is if Pikachu could hop on a skateboard to grind some rails in Saffron City. As far as the minigame goes I have never been that good at it myself though I still appreciate the cute sprite work we got from it all the same. I will add in closing about the "Surf House" that the now-discontinued 3DS Virtual Console version of Pokemon Yellow let everyone experience the minigame without getting a surfing Pikachu which is the way it should have been in the first place. By the way this whole debacle was the first time that I personally knew somebody who decided to use a Gameshark to cut corners in a game which is pretty remarkable in retrospect and I can't say that I blame them.

There is one more new feature of Pokemon Yellow that comes to mind to discuss that was a bit of a novelty. This title was the first Pokemon game with compatibility with the Gameboy Printer accessory. If a player of Pokemon Yellow has a Gameboy Color, the Gameboy Color link cable, and a Gameboy Printer would then be able to use some new features exclusive to this game among the first generation titles. The new printer feature would allow you to do things such as printing out copies of your high score you achieved on the "Pikachu's Beach" minigame, Pokedex entries, and even a stat summery sheet for any Pokemon in your party. Maybe the most notable thing to do with the printer is to print out a copy of your complete "Pokemon Diploma" which is available as a reward for obtaining all 151 Pokemon in the game. The tiny diploma in question was a huge flex at my soccer games. Beware for any of this to work it requires a specific sort of link cable for the console and printer to link up together.

In a sense, contemporary criticisms of Pokemon Yellow were not wrong. It didn't really add much over its predecessors in strict content terms or even do much to remedy the buggy mess that the first generation of Pokemon games was (I write while holding a fondness in my heart for the many ways generation one was broken). It is worth mentioning however that this game fixed the "Old Man Glitch" which players could use to encounter the infamous "MissingNo." glitch. The upcoming second generation titles of Pokemon Gold and Silver which would be arguably the biggest set of uncompromising advancements the series would ever see from one generation to the next. Overall this end-of-a-generation title pales in comparison to later attempts at a compilation title like Pokemon Crystal or Pokemon Emerald which improved their generations in more tangible ways. Even the graphical overhaul of Yellow Version feels half baked because many of the Pokemon were still stuck with the same back sprites in battle which for many of the original pokemon look like unrecognizable deformed blurs from the player trainer's point of view from behind.

As for the positives so many of the differences listed earlier in this piece are rather small arguably but to me majority of them added up and help create a unique, worthwhile experience. I don't think a change has to be significant in scale to have a big impact on a player in return. Following the game's release its defining feature after the game was released which stuck out to everybody years later was your companion Pikachu following you on the over-world. This just felt right for the series after-all we want to be on an adventure with our companions and to many they are as much our partners as they are family. The idea of a partner pokemon of your choosing following your trainer around the world would turn into the regular fan request for the series for years to come. However this feature wouldn't see a return in the handheld games until over a decade later on the DS with the fantastic Heart Gold/Soul Silver remakes of the second generation Pokemon games.

One could look at Pokemon Yellow cynically as did several game critics of the time and say it was an unambitious video game merely developed to further extract money from a young rabid fanbase with parents who will have to shell out more money for their child's new obsession. Indeed it is easy to look at Pokemon Yellow as a mere stopgap before the upcoming releases of the more technologically advanced upcoming titles on the horizon. For what it is worth the game blew me away as a young child at the time I was part of the target audience the developers were surely aiming to impress at the time, and none of the (not without merit) criticism stopped countless people including myself from falling in love with the game and having very fond memories of it that will last a lifetime. For many of us Pokemon fans the upcoming Gameboy Color games wouldn't replace the older games at all and it wasn't uncommon to concurrently play both generations.

As time passed eventually we would see the first generation of games remade for the Gameboy Advance in the form of FireRed and LeafGreen where Kanto got revisited for the first time. Closer to more recent times when The Pokemon Company and Nintendo looked to revisit the Kanto region yet again for Nintendo Switch to capitalize on the popularity explosion of Pokemon Go, and we saw the creators GameFreak look to Pokemon Yellow for some inspiration when creating Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee. These games turned out to be effectively abridged remakes of Pokemon Yellow with the intention catering to newcomers and many old players who had maybe fallen out of the series over the years. For the more dedicated players of the series these games were a considered a disappointment compared to the potential of a more expanded modern remake of the original generation of games. Maybe one day we will have another chance to revisit the Kanto region in a modern title but in the meantime we will always have the original games waiting for us.

In conclusion I must say Pokemon Yellow has a special place in my heart and I greatly enjoyed my recent revisiting of it for the purpose of writing this spotlight, and personally Pokemon Yellow is the way I would recommend anybody to experience the first generation of Pokemon for the first time. I think the idea of combining the first generation of games with the anime to create this interesting cocktail was a stroke of genius that has allowed the game to age very well with the enduring popularity of the anime. No matter how long Pokemon continues we can always look back at the roots of the series and find joy whether you are a veteran player or a first time player. Pokemon Yellow is a game any fan of the franchise should try for themselves if they haven't yet already. I cherish this game deeply and I'm confident in saying that many of you reading this likely cherish it too.

A gem hidden among the stones, Pokemon Yellow is undoubtedly stardust.

-- Larsa

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